Here Again
by Dragon Empress
Summary: KK PostJinchuu... 'The only thing that's clear now is that suddenly everything is different. Suddenly, impossibly.' After everything that happened, Kenshin could never just go back to how things were before...even if sometimes he badly wanted to...


**Man, the _Jinchuu_ Arc of the manga was good. So many things left for the humble fanfiction writer to wonder about, and indeed, write about. I haven't done a proper K/K in a while, and it is my favourite, so...enjoy! **

_- - -_

_The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.  
__-G.K. Chesterson_

He isn't quite sure what's supposed to happen now.

Hell, after everything that's happened recently, he's not even sure where he stands. The only thing that's clear now is that suddenly everything is different. Suddenly, impossibly.

She's there again, in the yard practising. There again, after being gone for so long. Too long. It makes him feel strange inside…like everything still isn't quite right, even though it looks it. A jigsaw with a corner piece missing; he feels _almost_ complete.

Her hair is different in sunlight, he muses, watching. Indoors it's black, but when you get her right out into the light…well, then it's something else entirely. He sees colours in the darkness; a whole universe of colour, revealed to him slowly, appearing in flashes and then sinking back into shadows.

He wonders if it's normal, or even healthy to pay this much attention to somebody's hair.

Not that it matters really, because all of a sudden it's like he can't help himself. Entranced, he watches her practise for hours on end, hidden as always in the shadows thrown by the ancient trees.

She belongs out in the sunlight, he decides, and then wonders what she would say if he joined her out there one day. Maybe one day soon. Maybe never. After all, he understands what it's like to need to be alone for a while…a decade…

She doesn't really need to know, he decides, that she won't ever be alone again. After all, it's more for his sake than hers. There were too many nightmares before, when she was gone-

_(He watches her eyes, tries not to remember them dead…)_

- too many times when he woke up with the scent of her blood in his nose and a scream locked behind his lips. When he was trapped in a Hell of another man's making; wasting away, his lifeline in chains. It was like suddenly, impossibly somebody had thrown paint (no, blood) across his masterpiece, ruined everything he had worked so hard for.

But now…she's there again, in the yard practising, and he isn't quite sure what's supposed to happen now. The chains are gone, but now there's a lead weight in his stomach and he's not sure if that's any better.

Both have weighed him down in the past, but lead is poisonous, and if a cure isn't found quickly he might just die here. On his own, once again.

And he won't put her through that. If anything, he might just live forever so she never needs to see him the way he saw her.

_(Eyes open and empty, she would have seen everything…)_

No, he would never be responsible for taking away the light in her eyes. Not again. It happened once before, or so he's been told. When he was gone.

But he never saw it.

All he saw was the way she looked at him in the dying light of Hiko's pottery shed, with deep blue shadows in her eyes and hair the colour of a midnight without stars. He thinks, perhaps, that's when infatuation might just have turned into obsession…

And it isn't normal. It certainly isn't healthy either.

He feels guilty now that the last guilt is gone; he feels guilty because now, he just wants to move on and be with _her._ The past is something that flashes red and blurred and bloody behind his eyelids at night when he tries to sleep alone in his own small, cold room.

When he sleeps with her there are no shadows.

At the window, sword in hand, he rests forever and rises reborn. Early and late, so she's none the wiser, because he's more than a little bit afraid of what she'd say. She doesn't need to know (she _can't_), he tells himself firmly, that she won't ever be alone again.

So here it is. It seems like every day he's here again, in the yard and watching her. Suddenly, impossibly, there is sunlight all the time and it's blinding and furious and takes time to get used to.

And so this is love. He understands- like a man who plans for rain that never comes- that it's something he can't possibly hope to understand at all.

But it belongs out in the sunlight. That much he knows for sure.

- - -

**Yeah, Kenshin comes across as a little...out of characterat times in this, I think, but I'm just going to say that it's his deepest, most personal thoughts and hope the excuse slides...and hey, he's quiet enough to get away with stalking...lol. **

**Also, as you lovely people all well know, all reviews are greatly appreciated! **


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